I’d like to share with you a new feature that will be launching soon – categorizing your friends!

Until now, anytime you’ve posted a photo, video, blog, or status update, that post has been distributed to all of your friends and fans, regardless of their relationship with you.

Starting this week, you’ll have much more control over not only who sees your posts, but how you spend your time viewing other people’s posts in your newsfeed.

So how will it work?

You now have the ability to categorize your friends into an unlimited number of categories.

To stay organized, you’ll want to make sure the people you add as friends are people you’ve actually met in person – otherwise they should be a fan instead.

By clicking “Add friend”, you’ll be prompted to categorize your relationship with that person. You can add your friend into any existing category, or create a new custom category.

Why is categorizing my friends important?

By categorizing your friends, you can choose exactly who will see your posts when you make them. This means that you now have full privacy and control over who sees any personal photos or thoughts that you may only want family or a specific group of friends to view.

Additionally, you can customize your feed to view only posts from a specific category (or categories) of friends – enabling you to focus on viewing the posts your care about the most at any point in time.

What will happen to my existing friends on empowr?

Since all of your existing friends and friend requests are not currently categorized, you’ll want to add those people into the categories that you feel they best belong in.

To save you valuable time, rather than forcing you to sort through your existing friends and trying to categorize them all, empowr will be converting them into fans instead.

This will happen in two steps:

1)1)You will see your number of fans increase as empowr converts your existing friends to fans. During this step, your number of friends will not change.

2)2)Once step 1 is complete and all of your current friends are converted, your number of friends will drop to 0.

From there, you can visit their profiles, add them back as friends, and categorize them as you see fit.

You can then view and organize your friends into different categories any time, simply by visiting your new Friends page.

Now that you have better control and organization over who your friends are (and who sees your posts), you’ll want to make sure that you choose your friends wisely. There is currently a limit of 100 friends that each user can have at one time, so if you don’t actually know someone well, be sure to keep them as fans.

The categorizing your friends feature, is just another step forward in giving empowr users more control over their experience within the community. This is just the start of many more things that will be launching soon, and I can’t wait to share them all with you.

There is nothing stopping you from posting your content for the whole world to see. If you want to continue to do this, then feel free to.
Many of our users would like to post content that is more personal or private, and share it with particular groups of people... such as their family, or people that they work with... and up til now they have not had this ability.
FanBox is now allowing this kind of control, but you do not have to use it (just like nothing else on the site is compulsory)!

Unbelievable Mr. President, I was thinking same thing like this last few days, and I was thinking it is undoable in FanBox, but actually it is, great first announcement, congratulations. Thank you very much Martin.!

Hi Silas, and thanks for the comment.
What other areas do you believe need improvement?
If there is a list, you can always discuss it with your SC or edit your monthly survey answers to include your suggestions :-)

Since I haven't met anyone personally that would leave me with zero friend... Don't you have a category where one can add someone who has been very supportive? Well, I guess, they will still be my BFOs ....

Hi Hazel,
The majority of users on FanBox have not met each other in person. We are a global economy, so this is to be expected.
If you have a long-standing relationship with certain users on the site, there is nothing stopping you from sending them a friend request again. However, think very carefully before you do this, because you only have room for 100 friend relationships... while your fans can be unlimited!

You raise a good point Khaleeq!
Some other social networks already give users the ability to categorize your friends list and manage who views the content you share. With this update, FanBox is giving you the same freedom to control your newsfeed and who views the content you post :-)

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